11.1. Calder Farris

The first thing Calder did after the explosion was find a bathroom and clean the blood off his face. Flying debris and glass had assaulted his exposed skin like shrapnel. Little dark spots showed where particles had embedded themselves. He left them; he didn’t have time to dick with that now.

The second thing he did was call Dr. Rickman, his superior at the DoD. This was no longer a solo mission, Calder said; this was a possible XL3.

The XLs were codewords they used in the field when there was something definite to report. An XL1 was the discovery of a new weapon, typically something on the order of a bomb. An XL2 was a really big bomb. An XL3 was an unknown weapon of mass destruction.

In retrospect, it might have been overdoing it. But there were two ways to play it safe here. The first way to play it safe was by assuming the worst in order to get the situation under control as hard and fast as possible. The second was to be leery of calling an XL3 until he had proof positive that’s what it was. It all came down to his faith in the powers of devastation of the thing he was chasing.

By dawn, Calder had everything the DoD could give him.

7:00 A.M.

Lieutenant Farris, Lieutenant Hinkle, and six other men in long black trench coats and dark glasses walked into Swedish Hospital in Seattle. They had a hardened, regimental look and the gait of a death squad. They knew where she was being kept: the second floor. According to their information, the detective in charge of the investigation was up there now. Calder didn’t bother with anyone less than that. When they emerged from the elevator and were questioned by a young officer, Calder flipped his ID and kept walking.

By the time they reached Seattle Police Department’s Detective Mathers, they were expected. Mathers stood in the hall, hands on his hips, his officers around him. Calder’s eye flickered to Mathers’s badge, verifying the name.

“Detective Mathers? Calder Farris, FBI. We’re authorized to take over here, as I think you’ll find if you contact your—”

“He already called.” Mathers looked wary and excited. He jerked his head down the hall, signaling Calder to a private conversation. Calder followed.

“What’s the FBI’s interest?” Mathers asked when they were alone. He was a lean man, trying to look younger than his forty-odd years. He had a conspiratorial air, chewing his gum in an anxious rhythm. Calder, whose dark glasses were still in place, treated him to a stony, blank face. Mathers lost a little of his bonhomie.

“We’re investigating the possibility of terrorist activity.”

“Thought so. Is it because of this lab run by Dr. Talcott? You got a tip on her or somethin’? Some reason to think she’s in league with Al-Qaeda or someone like that?”

Calder said nothing, letting Mathers draw his own conclusions. The FBI on a terrorist investigation was a common-enough story. It would hold for a while, keep this thing from attracting the interest of the wrong people.

“We have the fire department and an arson expert on-site,” Mathers said.

“We just sent in our own. They’ll be taking over. For now, we’re on media blackout.”

Mathers frowned at this, scratched his chin. “You want me to stick around? Go over—”

“I want you to clear out. You and your men. You have notes? Photographs? Information on Dr. Talcott? You will have interviewed her. I’d like a transcript.”

“She’s unconscious. Been asleep since we brought her in. Doctors advised that we let her. She’s had a fever over a hundred and two. Viral, they think.”

Calder felt relieved but didn’t show it. These past few hours had been frustrating, waiting for everything to be put into place, thinking about what Talcott might be telling the Seattle police inside this very building while he waited outside like a cuckolded husband.

“Fine. Just hand over whatever you have. If I have questions, I’ll call you.”

Mathers was getting pissed at the brush-off. “I thought the FBI worked in conjunction with local authorities. This is our university, our kids.”

“This is a national security issue, Detective Mathers, and no longer your responsibility.”

Within five minutes, Calder’s men had the entire floor cleared of Seattle’s finest. Objective achieved: contain the situation; eliminate outsiders. Mathers would probably hold up his reports for hours to make a point. Let him. Calder had Talcott, and he’d already done his own background check on her.

He accepted a paper cup of cold water from one of his associates and drank it in a gulp. He removed his coat and went in, alone, to see her.

There, in the hospital bed, making barely a mound under the sheets, was a woman. Calder walked to the foot of the bed and took off his glasses, stared. Her arms stuck out of the hospital gown, thin and pale and freckled. Her hair was a nondescript shade of dirty blond and was unwashed (probably sick for a few days at least, Calder noted). Her face was narrow, aquiline, unexceptional, but not unattractive and not without character. It reminded him of the faces of plainswomen he’d seen in photographs: hard, not with denigration, the way hookers’ faces are hard, but with a rocklike determination to take whatever life threw their way. She might prove stubborn, but she was female, after all, and looked too physically insignificant to be a real problem.

As if feeling his eyes like cold spots on her flesh, the woman shivered in her sleep and turned over.

He could wake her now. But he had other things to take care of—making sure the on-site team at the university had cleared out the local workers, for example, and seeing if she had any confidantes, despite Grover’s remark that she was a loner. She could wait. She wasn’t going anywhere.

Calder picked up her chart and smiled: Jill Talcott, doctorate in physics from the University of Tennessee, onetime graduate student of Dr. Henry Ansel.

11.2. Nate Andros

Nate was serving Saturday brunch at the Coastal Kitchen when the guy came in. Huge, hamhanded, with a face like a pork loin. He didn’t exactly fit in on Capitol Hill, where the men were less macho as a rule: students, artists, musicians, gays. Nate was too distracted this morning to notice, not until someone pointed him out.

“Rambo at ten o’clock,” said Michél as he spun by carrying twin platters, his hips swinging.

Nate looked and saw that Pork-Loin-Face—Rambo—was looking at a menu. He’d been seated in Nate’s section.

“Great,” Nate said, to no one in particular.

He was exhausted. He’d been at the hospital until 2:00 A.M., hovering around the waiting room. The police had finally asked who he was, and he’d said, “A friend.” He would have told them more, if they’d pressed. They didn’t. They seemed disorganized. And the longer he’d sat there without being questioned, the more nervous he became about what he would say, so he’d ditched.

Maybe he shouldn’t have come in to work today. He wasn’t thinking too clearly. This morning it had seemed like a good excuse in case the cops asked why he hadn’t come to the station to volunteer what he knew: I was working. But he could barely make himself go through the paces. He was frantic about Jill, wishing he could be at her bedside to hold her hand—as if she’d want him to—or at least be there to see for himself that she was going to be okay. And he couldn’t stop thinking, too, about the deep, deep, deep shit they were in. Atlantic Ocean deep.

What the hell was he going to tell the police? What could he tell them without making Jill look guilty as hell? Or himself, for that matter? He was as much a party to everything that had happened as she was.